ALBUQUERQUE - While he told the world that a weather balloon went down in Roswell, an Army general had in his hand a memo telling Pentagon brass of a UFO crash with "victims," according to a new television documentary.

A computer analysis of that memo, held by Brig. Gen. Roger Ramey during a July 1947 press briefing, is the "smoking gun" of the Roswell Incident, researchers say in the documentary being broadcast today on the Sci-Fi Channel.

Using a digital photo scanner to enlarge and enhance words printed on the folded piece of paper Ramey held, and using another computer program to select the most likely words, researcher David Rudiak, who has a Ph.D. in physics from UC Berkeley, found two key phrases: "the victims of the wreck" and "in the 'disc' they will ship."

With the textual study plus University of New Mexico archaeological findings from one of three alleged UFO crash sites, science fiction seeks to close the gap with fact, producers say.

A photograph taken July 8, 1947, in Fort Worth, Texas, by James Bond Johnson of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram shows Ramey clutching a communique to Washington, D.C., while he displays a deflated weather balloon just hours after other Army officers in Roswell had reported a UFO crash.

It was one of a series of inconsistent military reports about the incident, which has become part of American mythology.

"Unless national security is at stake, there is absolutely no reason to keep this information from the public," said Thomas Vitale, a Sci-Fi Channel vice president. "Whatever crashed at Roswell, let us know what the truth is."

The Air Force had responded to a 1994 call from the late U.S. Rep. Steve Schiff, R-N.M., by saying it had no information on the Roswell Incident. Schiff, an Air Force reserve judge advocate general's officer, then took his query to the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress.

In 1997, the Air Force acknowledged the weather balloon had been a false cover story, but a new story also was called into question. In a report written by Lt. William McAndrew, the Air Force suggested reports of alien bodies in the wreckage must have originated because of a crash-test program in which mannequins were dropped from balloons. The mannequins did not come close to matching 1947 descriptions of alien bodies, and the crash-test program was not introduced until 1953, Rudiak said.

Sci-Fi, guided by longtime Roswell UFO researchers Tom Carey and Don Schmitt, commissioned William Doleman, an archaeologist with UNM's Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, to excavate the alleged initial crash contact point on the ranch where the late Mack Brazel worked as foreman.

Doleman said he knows little about the Roswell Incident but agreed to excavate the site using purely scientific methods because it is "culturally significant" and because so much of what is circulated about the Roswell crash landing is based on hearsay. What was needed, Doleman said, was physical evidence.

"So this project is a very bold step by people who claim to know what happened and where it happened," Doleman said. "What makes it bold is they were willing to go out there and look for physical evidence."

Details of the excavation are being kept confidential until after today's premiere. But Doleman said he agrees "that obviously something happened in July 1947 in southeastern New Mexico." After his work there, though, he said, "I'm still uncertain" about UFOs and alien beings.

The documentary will introduce some witnesses who have not been heard from publicly before, attesting to the existence of alien bodies in the wreckage of the "flying disc," Carey said by phone from his home in Pennsylvania.

"This is where we loaded the bodies," he quotes one New Mexico witness, Robert Slusher, as saying. Slusher, among those appearing in the documentary, was part of a B-29 crew that he said loaded bodies up through the plane's bomb bay at the Roswell Army Airfield.

Three victims were supposedly recovered from the final crash site, and a team of archaeologists, coincidentally, were in the area doing research on ancient Indians at the time, Carey said. Among them was Curry Holden, an archaeologist from Texas Tech in Lubbock, whom Carey located in 1992.

"Curry Holden said he saw everything - the craft and the bodies," Carey said. Holden died a few months later.

Carey, an investigator for a private corporation, said he started looking into Roswell 12 years ago "as a hobby."

But it became more than that. And now, he said, he and Schmitt are in a race against time, as witnesses become scarcer.

The "Freedom of Information" documents alone testify to something big happening at Roswell. Why else would they black out page after page after page? Surely a "weather" balloon wouldn't necessitate that kind of secrecy.

Given all the givens, I would NOT expect super startling things to come out in a rush. This has been exceedingly controlled for a very long time for such momentous modern events.

Whether the government's fears about disclosure are valid or not; they are exceedingly unlikely to do it other than slowly, bit by bit and judge the results step by step.

Of course, if God or the ET's decide otherwise beyond the government's control, then the government may feel compelled to play quick catchup.

It should be interesting. This coming out with the movie TAKEN should prove to be at least interesting to those of us who've studied the phenomena for 40+ years. So far, the program seems to be a carefully crafted incremental set of minor to moderate disclosures. Far more than the likes of Gumbel sp? has been party to before. Far less than many of us would hope for.

IF as the government tries to insist--out of ONE side of it's multifaceted, duplicitous mouth--that there's nothing of any significance; nothing of any far out nature; nothing of any security issues about the whole subject--then

WHY

is !!!75%!!! of the document merely JUSTIFYING THE HIGHEST CLASSIFICATIONS OF ANY SUBJECT in government files--why is 75% of the document merely justifying the classification BLACKED OUT. 75% BLACKED OUT. WHY? If there's nothing to it as the government line would have us believe! Crazy. What silliness. They really expect us to be idiots and so far, the stooges in the press and the public at large have obliged them. Human nature is so funny.

Well, I just watched the program .if only because I live about 50 miles from the supposed landing/crash site

The speculation looked hokey to me. It's bad enough that Bryant Gumble is narrator. (Is that the best job he can get these days?) But the clincher was the producers bringing in the interested "Governor Richardson"[sic]. Not only does his appearance add nothing to the speculation, someone needs to tell these yahoos that Bill Richardson, elected November 5, is still only the governor-elect and he will not be governor until inaugurated in January, 2003.

I don't really question your sanity, really. I just note the death grip your biases seem to have on your assessment and filtering skills when it comes to sorting out signal from the noise.

But it would be somewhat plausible to question the sanity of someone who seemed to swallow the government's line--hook line and sinker.

To respond to your "nonquestion" hiding as a statement--I don't know if the ET's came from within our galaxy or a different one or "merely" another set of dimensions. But they were not a result of human genetic research in 1940.

But go ahead and enjoy your rigid, narrow, world view. It's days are numbered. You may as well enjoy it while you can. The jolt will be serious enough when it comes.

As someone who shaves with Occam's razor on a daily basis, I must concede that I firmly believe "something," happened at Roswell in '47. The automatic assumption that it had something to do with ETs is pretty tenuous.

IMHO, it probably involved the crash of a nuke-laden B-29 from the 509th which was never completely recovered.

I'd like to think, that in the wake of such, some clever, patriotic, young intel officer had the foresight to keep the soviets on edge throughout the coldwar, wondering the whole time, if in fact we were reverse-engineering alien technology, and just feeding enough credibility to the theory that the reds never fully shook the hook. If in fact, this was the case, I apologize to the democratic party for my failure to recognize their contributions through the training and education of an appropriate number of useful idiots to perpetuate the scam.

As an intellectual exercise, and to drive home a point to investigative recruits for my company, I recently rewrote an investigative report, and through the use of passive voice, implication and selective editing, generated a report that, IMHO, was legally sufficient, 100% accurate, and yet, read 180 degrees opposite of what actually happened!

I'd love to think the soviet empire went bankrupt trying to infiltrate Area-51 and obtaining alien tach, while Reagan was convincing east and west germans to start swinging sledge hammers from both sides of the wall.

"So, the Ramey memo has now been shown to talk about "victims" and "disc" etc.

Sounds like a bit of confirmation to me."

Research Rudiak's bio, then try to convince me of the authenticity of his analysis. I know for a fact that there are FReepers here who could make legit photoshp images of the Ramey memo stating, "gore wins florida!!!"

In YOUR world view, people are either rigidly and narrowly closed minded somewhat like a stainless steel sphere with no joints . . . OR They are so open minded their brains fall out. And you accuse others of being less than integrated and actualized? Interesting. Evidently your mirror is also shattered. Message in Ramey's hands in baloon hoax newspaper photo: WE HAVE AVIATORS IN THE DISC, WE ARE GOING TO SHIP THEM BY . . . IN THE DISC . . . VICTIMS OF THE WRECK . . . But don't rattle your sanity by believing the evidence. Sleep well in your willful blindness.

Good question. While I have no personal knowledge of the particulars in the redactions of this case file I can suggest that the bulk of the redactions are comprised of personnel data and speculative cya...game playing what-ifs...

There would be no smoking gun in the redactions...just privacy issues and embarassing speculation and PR snafus. That said, there certainly was a crash in Roswell that date and various agencies of the government have consistently lied about it. When the government goes to that much trouble to pull the shades on something it means only one thing...whatever happened started out routine and the further up the chain it went some wiseass...decided to make a mess of the facts...and J. Edgar always hated to look stupid...

While I don't believe it was an "alien" craft, I refuse to be so arrogant as to assume we are alone in the universe...let alone smart enough to escape our own gravity without a lot of noise and smoke.

"Message in Ramey's hands in baloon hoax newspaper photo: WE HAVE AVIATORS IN THE DISC, WE ARE GOING TO SHIP THEM BY . . . IN THE DISC . . . VICTIMS OF THE WRECK . . ."

I'm not closing my mind per se,. I'm just looking for the most reaonable explanation. I could sit here all night and dream up all kinds of possibilities for the Ramey Memo, the subsequent Blue Book Findings, etc. How about this one...

Ramey was in cahoots w/ Stalin, and typed up the memo, in the hopes that it would be photographed in adequate detail to undermine the credibility of the U.S. gov't party line, thereby undermining the credibility of the nascent USAF?

Give me proof to the contrary...seems like a plausible theory to me...

I question the sanity of those who believe that in the 130+ BILLION(yes, with a B) estimated galaxies(and this an estimate I remember from a couple of years ago), that the Earth is the only planet with life on it.

In my Navy Radioman Cryptographer job, I handled tons of highly classified documents. The sorts of phrases and sentences you presume to have been redacted don't look like the redactions in the document shown on the program--by a wide margin.

It APPEARS SOMEWHAT that your mind MAY be open fractionally enough to be influenced by quality evidence. I'd be keenly interested if you read the entire 570 pages of Greer's newly published book DISCLOSURE

whether you'd come away with your feelings/opinions now entirely intact. That would be very interesting.

Whether such a person would use "wreck" vs wreckage etc. DEPENDS ON MANY FACTORS.

1) What was the preferred vocabulary in the family he grew up in . . . in the region he grew up in . . . among the friends he played with . . .

2) How much of an independent personality was he in terms of his lifestyle, word uses etc.

3) What era he grew up in.

4) What post was he stationed at in what year. How rural was it etc.

5) Many military message writers naturally and others were so encouraged to use short words where possible to speed communications. . . . a practice Radiomen typing on clunky teletypes greatly appreciated.

WOW, some fair-mindedness from a nonbeliever in this thread. How refreshing. Thanks.

I believe the government lied and continues to lie. I believe something containing life crashed in Roswell and some monkey's orphaned children are living high on the hog in Tahiti.

I have met the daughter of one of the base cadre and she insists that her father never would talk about the crash until he became angry with the admissions that the 'weather balloon' was a hoax...since he had been sworn to secrecy...on penalty of penury...and he said there were bodies...

And once more, I think they were monkeys but would be tremendously excited and pleased that they were really alf's...but if they were, I hope their relatives don't know how shabbily we've treated their remains.

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